The Trouble With Wanting Men

New York Times

7 days ago

The stranger arrived at the bar before I did, as I intended him to, and was waiting for me at a table in back. He had the kind of face I like, and he had been a little difficult to pin down, delayed in his responses, which I also like. The place was loud with the 'having fun' sounds people make when they expect to have fun any minute now, so we were leaning in to hear each other. His hair, I thought, would be good to put my hands in.
There comes a time, usually, when a few extra beats of eye contact are enough. We passed through these beats, took each other's wrists and met across the table, which was wide enough to frustrate kissing in the right way, keeping the rest of us well apart. Back at my place he was a little shy, I thought, or a little out of practice, but I felt he wanted me, which was what I wanted — to be organized and oriented by his desire, as though it were a point on the dark horizon, strobing.
'I was really looking forward to seeing you again,' he texted me the following week, around lunchtime, 'but I'm going through some intense anxiety today and need to lay low :(.'
'Totally understand,' I replied, but I didn't. Feeble, fallible 'looking forward' is not longing; a man should want me urgently or not at all. I was about to collapse into a ritual of frustrated horniness (fantasy, masturbation, snacks) when a friend urged me to join her and two other women for dinner.
'Of course he has anxiety,' said one of them, a therapist, who sat across from me at the restaurant. 'That's life. That's being alive and going to meet someone you don't know well.'
'Yeah,' said the woman beside her, a historian. 'It's called 'sexual tension.' Stay with it for a minute and you might get some.'
'They can't,' said my friend with triumphant disgust. She told us about a woman she knew who was dating a man from another city. After weeks of saying 'I can't wait to see you,' the man ghosted her during his actual visit. His explanation later? He'd been 'too anxious.'
'Aww, poor baby!' cried the historian, and we all cooed and moaned for the poor wittle fraidy-cat boo-boo, working ourselves into a frenzy of laughter over men's inability to 'man up and [expletive] us.' We were four women at a vegan restaurant in downtown Manhattan; we knew what show we were in, and we couldn't help but wonder, in a smug, chauvinistic way: Where were the men who could handle hard stuff? Like leaving the house for sex?
The therapist mused about the anxiety of needing to 'justify the phallus.' 'You know,' she said, 'from the child's point of view, it's like, 'I get what Mom is for, but what are you for? What's the point of your thing?'' This sent us miming confrontations with imaginary members — 'Who invited you?' 'What's your deal?' 'Are you lost?' — which led to wisecracks about the not-so-precision scalpel of the surgeon the therapist was seeing. Privately, jokes aside, I am quite susceptible to penis — like, I worry that in some Hobbesian state of nature I might just automatically kneel to the prettiest one — but lately I have been bruised by the ambivalence of men, how they can first want me and then become confused about what they want, and this bawdy, diminishing humor soothed me, made me feel more powerful, more in control.
'When did the men get so anxious about desire?' asked the therapist, and I said I didn't know. 'Yes, you do,' my friend said. 'It was when they were put on notice that they can't just get drunk and grope us.'
I haven't been dating long (just the other day my ex-husband and I received our Judgment of Divorce as an email attachment), but long enough to discover that I have a type. He is gentle, goofy, self-deprecating, rather deferential, a passionate humanist, a sweet guy, a 'good guy.' He tends to signal, in various ways, his exemption from the tainted category of 'men,' and it is perfectly understandable that he would wish to do so. It must be mildly embarrassing to be a straight man, and it is incumbent upon each of them to mitigate this embarrassment in a way that feels authentic to him.
One of the reasons my marriage ended was that I fell in love with another man — whom I'll refer to by his first initial, J. Spontaneously graceful, with a soft voice and an inordinate, sad-eyed smile, J. made me laugh, stopping my breath. Being a 'good guy,' he intimated from the jump that he did not know how to 'do' relationships, giving me to understand that if I expected one with him (or, as he may have conceptualized it, from him), I did so at my peril (which was his peril, too, since he would hate to hurt me). Still, he pursued me; we seemed to be 'doing' something together.
I keep encountering and hearing about men who 'can't.' Have these men not heard of 'don't want to?'
My husband and I had an open relationship at the time that J. and I met, so the terms of our involvement were, at first, limited, and although J. exerted a pleasant pressure against these limitations, ultimately they suited him. I was the one who violated the terms by finding it intolerable, after a while, to care that much, in that way, for one person while being married to another. I could not disambiguate sex from love nor love from devotion, futurity, family integration, things I wanted with (from?) J., even as, throughout the year and a half or so that we saw each other, he continued to gesture to his incapacity to commit as if it were a separate being, an unfortunate child who followed and relied upon him, maybe, or a physical constraint. I stood there reaching for him while he sad-faced back at me like a boxed mime: He couldn't talk about it; he wished things were different; maybe someday the child would mature, the glass would break, but for now, there was really nothing to be done.
It seems to me, surveying the field as a dating novice, that this kind of studiously irreproachable male helplessness abounds. I keep encountering and hearing about men who 'can't.' Have these men not heard of 'don't want to?'
Maybe my friend was right about male anxiety at this moment. Maybe the men are taking a beat, 'laying low,' unsure of how to want, how to talk, how to woo. Maybe they are punishing us for the confusion.
There are many routes to the species of disappointment I am circling here, but however we get there, the complaint is so common, such a cultural and narrative staple, that the academy is weighing in. We now have a fancy word, 'heteropessimism,' to describe the outlook of straight women fed up with the mating behavior of men. Coined by the sexuality scholar Asa Seresin, who later amended it to 'heterofatalism,' the term seems, at first glance, to distill a mood that is no less timely for being timeless.
'It was rly nice,' a close friend texted me recently, reporting on her third date with a lawyer. 'He's really really sweet and nice to me and good at sex. No doubt something humiliating and nightmarish will occur soon.' On more than one occasion, when my friend checked in with the lawyer to confirm tentative plans, he did not respond to her for many hours, or even a day. Granted, he worked a punishing schedule, but, my friend reasoned, it takes 90 seconds to send a quick reply. The dissonance between his caring and attentive in-person behavior and these silences confused her, and she mentioned this to him. The lawyer was sorry he had kept her waiting — he hadn't meant to — but, he said, her complaint had got him thinking: He unfortunately wasn't able to escalate whatever was happening between them into a 'relationship.' My friend clarified that she had not been asking to escalate anything, merely expressing a need for clarity about plans. He understood that, he said, but their 'communication skills' were obviously too different for them to continue dating.
The humiliating and nightmarish part, she explained to me, was not so much the rejection as being cast against her will as 'woman eager for relationship.' In her memoir, 'Fierce Attachments,' Vivian Gornick describes the anguish of being ignored by a lover to her female friend: 'What I couldn't absorb,' she writes, 'was his plunging us back into the cruelty of old-fashioned man-woman stuff, turning me into a woman who waits for a phone call that never comes and himself into the man who must avoid the woman who is waiting.'
'I'm really done,' my friend said. 'I can't keep doing this. I don't want to be hurt and misunderstood constantly. I need to find some other way to live.' I agreed without thinking about it. (This is part of the pessimism, right? The feeling that further thinking about all of this is futile. Surely we have done enough thinking by now.) 'I wish I could just be gay with you,' she said, and I said I wished that, too, so much. This was our commiserative routine — what Seresin might call our 'performative disaffiliation with heterosexuality' — our spin on 'Take my wife, please.' Take my straightness, please. Take my attraction to men.
Is 'heterofatalism' a useful concept? I took it up for a while, considered the positions. The writer and gender scholar Sara Ahmed has advanced the idea of 'complaint as feminist pedagogy,' arguing that to bitch is inherently transgressive, a form of resistance, while the philosophy professor Ellie Anderson suggests that women venting their dating woes constitutes a kind of negativity as rebellion. Was that what my friends and I were doing over dinner? Rebelling?
The humiliating and nightmarish part was not so much the rejection as being cast against her will as 'woman eager for relationship.'
If the experts say my romantic letdowns have some larger social significance, I am not going to argue. The men I want are not wanting me badly enough, not communicating with me clearly enough, not devoting themselves to me: All this certainly seems calamitous enough to warrant an 'ism.' And if it is an 'ism,' the problem cannot be me. It must be men, right? Men are what is rotten in the state of straightness, and why shouldn't we have an all-inclusive byword for our various pessimisms about them? Domestic pessimism (they still do less of the housework and child care); partner-violence pessimism (femicide is still gruesomely routine); erotic pessimism (the clitoris and its properties still elude many of them). And the petulantly proud masculinist subcultures that have arisen, at least in part, as reactions to these pessimisms keep coughing up new reasons to fear, rage against and complain about 'men.'
But those 'men' are not the men my friends and I are feeling bleak about. It's the sweet, good ones. Dammit.
I would like to believe there is something purposeful, resistant, even radical in the heterofatalist mode, but the more I voice it, the more I am inclined to agree with Seresin that it can produce nothing but more of itself. 'Heterosexuality is nobody's personal problem,' he writes. 'It doesn't make sense to extricate your own straight experience from straightness as an institution.' It isn't that my friend needs to find 'some other way to live'; it's that we all do. But instead of looking for it, we disaffected women 'perform' for one another this mutually enabling kind of maintenance, periodically off-gassing some of the shame and frustration of dating men and then chugging along with the status quo.
Whatever Seresin's vision is, most of us can neither renounce our heterosexuality nor realize a significant renegotiation of its terms. What we can do, at least for now, is negotiate with ourselves. We can try to dodge 'old-fashioned man-woman stuff' by acting hopeless about relationships rather than 'eager' for them. Maybe this is the utility of 'heterofatalism' — naming the bitter pill before we force ourselves to swallow it and put on a carefree smile. Nice to meet you, 'good guy'; I am 'woman who expects nothing.'
I was doubled over laughing, briefly tasting the knee of my jeans, while the man next to me on the sectional couch strummed a guitar and did a spot-on imitation of Bruce Springsteen. He had that lifting-something-heavy moan down cold, and he was improvising a song about work, American work in the American heartland, hyperbolically tough and tragic male work. Because I was losing it, he kept going, and I kept losing it, and at a certain point I wasn't sure if I was overpowered by amusement or just overpowered by him.
On the way to his place, I had been texting with my aunt. 'Word from an expert,' she wrote. 'Wait til he wants it so bad he's nutsy cuckoo. Sounds facile but, man, truer words were never spoken. 'Make 'em Suffer' is my mantra!'
I kept catching myself staring at his mouth, his bottom lip. He told me to slow down; he needed time to get a better sense of how I worked. I lay back to murmur, let him try stuff, and he warmed to his own control, putting his mouth right up to mine, then pulling away when I tried to engage his tongue. 'I see what you are,' he said finally, pinning my forearms. 'You're a bratty sub.' He held himself there, just out of reach, breathing on me. 'I like to make you wait,' he said.
He did make me wait. I stood at the slot machine watching those cherries and fat yellow coins blur by, and they didn't stop. He was sweet with me in person, impulsive about biting my nose, but for stretches I wouldn't hear from him, or I would but only perfunctorily, and then, suddenly, he would pop up. Requesting clarification on what a man feels or wants or sees happening here has gotten me burned before, as it has many women I know. I have learned to regard such demands as 'demanding' in a feminized way — simultaneously bossy and supplicating, a reinscribing of the 'bratty sub' position. Taking my cues from him, I stayed mostly quiet. Call it 'communication pessimism.'
On the bed, the 'female demand-male withdraw' pattern pulses with sensuality; in life it sometimes feels like it will drive me out of my senses.
When my friend complained about the lawyer, I expressed outrage at his behavior and worked my way, quite naturally and along a well-worn groove, to a condemnation of all — OK, most — men as incapable of upholding basic standards of communication and care. I was thinking, of course, about J., and I am not proud that my instinctive response to the shame of being gender-stereotyped by life is to pay another stereotype forward. (Men suck. Groundbreaking!)
That said, men's struggle to communicate in romantic relationships is widespread enough to have earned a psychological designation: 'normative male alexithymia,' or the condition of being unable to put words to emotions. This incapacity, Ellie Anderson argues, often forces women who date men to become 'relationship-maintenance experts,' solidifying what she cites as 'the most common communication pattern among heterosexual dating couples … the 'female demand-male withdraw' pattern.' Woman approaches man to discuss something; man removes himself.
On the bed, the 'female demand-male withdraw' pattern pulses with sensuality; in life it sometimes feels like it will drive me out of my senses, and it creates work — tough, tragic female work. In the 1980s, the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild coined the term 'emotional labor' to describe paid work that 'involves trying to feel the right feeling for the job' (i.e. service work, health care, education). It must be an indication of our need for more ways to talk about the invisible affective labor that often falls to women that the term has suffered from 'concept creep,' stretching far past that original meaning to crop up in everyday conversations about unequal divisions of labor in our love lives.
Anderson gives us a new term, related to but distinct from 'emotional labor' and more useful in parsing what we might call the micropolitics of dating: She calls the work women do to interpret mystifying male cues 'hermeneutic labor,' and she posits it as a form of 'gendered exploitation in intimate relationships.' The guy dating my friend may have been too busy lawyering to confirm his plans with her, but meanwhile, Anderson might say, my friend was working two jobs: one to earn her living, the other as sole manager of an emotional entanglement that was also his. Heterofatalism is partly just burnout.
The stranger waiting at my usual back corner table looked a bit squarer than my average date — his hair appeared recently washed and cut, and he wore a button-down shirt — but some restless mischief played in his face, bearing itself fully in his laugh. Our conversation was brisk and jesting; I got the impression he was enjoying my company but that this was more bonus than criterion for him. He was partnered already, he had told me, and seeking only companionate sex; his dating profile referenced this clearly below a picture of him wearing a blue blazer and petting a donkey's head.
We turned eventually to the subject of erotic temperament. He was interested in the possibilities that arise between people when any eventuality of marriage, procreation or fidelity was, so to speak, taken off the bed. What might then happen in that bed? In that community? In that world? Watching his clean-cut boyish form and listening to him speak with the eloquent enthusiasm of a connoisseur, the phrase that occurred to me was 'sex nerd.' Many dabblers in nonmonogamy were not really, he noted with a laugh, quoting the rapper Pusha T, ''bout dat life.' He was.
I meet this type around sometimes: fluent in the language of polyamory, waving his respectful desire around like a plastic light saber: Pew pew. Why would you play with just one toy when you can take turns with all the toys? While at the same time vaguely subverting … something. Capitalism?
What were my feelings, Sex Nerd wanted to know, about groups? I confessed to having no interest. What can happen between two people, that thing where a pair of beings lock onto and suspend each other, aching for and into each other — I was about that thing, that life. Sure sure, he got that, he respected that — but he had actually found that the intense, intimate kind of connection I described could occur between, say, four people. And when it did, he added with teeth, it was quite an experience.
The bitterness does not replace wanting men, a man, the smell of a man's thin T-shirt, the dampness of the hair at his nape.
I conceded that it was a fascinating prospect, but one I could not mentalize, or at least not in any way that moved me. Totally, he said, that was totally valid. He was generally eager to assure me that my desires were valid, both in person and later, when he wrote to me on more than one occasion to clarify that: 'If you feel our energies aren't matched, I won't argue,' and, 'If friendship only is preferred, I will understand,' and truly, 'No pressure.' Good guy. Protesting a bit much on the consensuality front, but basically a stand-up guy. Evolved, transparent, an enlightened creature of our new romantic age. If only I could desire a man like that, a man bringing such clear terms to the table, enough to be disappointed by him. (Isn't that what desire is? A site of potential disappointment?) But I couldn't, which was another disappointment.
Two bodies were pressed together outside an entrance to the subway on my way home, the man's hand wrapped tightly around the back of the woman's head, and as I passed them a noise escaped me, a choking sound, a performance of disgust for the benefit of some bitter omniscience. The bitterness does not replace wanting men, a man, the smell of a man's thin T-shirt, the dampness of the hair at his nape after he exerts himself; the bitterness grows from the want and is mixed up with it. There must be something wrong, I keep thinking, with the way I desire.
'A good man is hard to want,' a good man wrote in the group chat.
'A hard man is good to find,' said another who knows I haven't had satisfying sex in a minute.
'A man is hard to find good?' said the previous man's girlfriend.
'A good find is hard to man,' I said, as if a guy were a tricky piece of equipment. 'Slow down, I need to get a better sense of how you work.'
'You're flattening the men,' a former lover wrote to me after I sent him a partial draft of this essay. 'They never get to be real — they're used to confirm a story about disappointment and frustration.'
This man and I met last fall when he was, like me, reeling from romantic rejection, and within a half-hour we lunged at each other, as though by tacit agreement to be each other's comforting, orgasm-giving blankies for a time. We traded obsessive accounts of the failed relationships, cheered each other through the rigors of 'no contact,' watched Albert Brooks movies, belted Weezer songs to karaoke tracks on his couch.
Whatever was happening between us went on for about six weeks, at which point I became annoyed that he was withholding something from me, though I couldn't say what exactly, and he became anxious about annoying me, and I accused him of coldness, and he accused me of being unfair, and so on. The familiar 'female demand-male withdraw' pattern descended over us like a polarizing spell, making me more goading and accusatory, him more defended and reserved. Unlike other, similar exchanges in my past, this one had an oddly mechanical quality, as though rather than venting real passions, we were locked into some tiresome, bewitched choreography.
In 'Beyond Doer and Done To,' the feminist psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin describes the impasse two people can reach where 'each feels unable to gain the other's recognition, and each feels in the other's power.' In this state, which she calls 'complementary twoness,' both people feel helpless, both feel 'done to,' both feel the other is 'leaving us no option except to be either reactive or impotent.'
Who knows how long the dance of complementary twoness would have lasted with my fellow Weezer singer had one or both of us felt ourselves to be in love. As it was, after a couple of weeks we were able to break the enchantment, and we remain friends. Eventually I admitted to him that it had felt more natural to me to default to 'wounded female' rather than assume responsibility for my desires. He, for his part, described a large-looming ex whose adept use of guilt had left its mark. It was one of those moments of becoming aware, suddenly and fleetingly, of how we play ourselves and cast others to play opposite us in the productions of our internal dramas known as days.
My sexuality owes me neither protection nor affirmation; it is out for itself, out for a skirmish, a strain, a smell.
He has questions now, about this piece. Aren't I oversimplifying the case of my friend and the lawyer? Isn't what happened there about more than communication? Don't I recognize a clear incompatibility, arising from both of their insecurities? And regarding hermeneutic labor: Why would a woman want to be with a man who required so much work? Such a woman must intuit that such a man is not ready for a relationship, or that he is unsure of his feelings for her. Isn't she just as much a part of the enactment of whatever 'heteropessimistic' outcome is looming there? In fact, isn't my taking my friend's side, as I seem to do here, related to the phenomenon I am diagnosing? Isn't the impulse to 'choose a side' itself perversely fatalistic, antithetical to the mutual recognition that is the very basis of a relationship?
I toppled the whole structure of my life for a man who, when I asked him, 'Do you want to be with me or not?' replied, after a few seconds' silence, 'I want to be with you, and I want everything everywhere all at once.' J. was referring, of course, to the 2022 surreal sci-fi comedy set across a multitude of parallel universes in which many versions of the protagonists play out many versions of their lives, each millisecond branching fractal-like into countless alternate dimensions, creating infinite selves, infinite fates, infinite answers to the dilemma of how to be and with whom. This film had moved him deeply, seeming to capture qualities of his neurotype that he seldom saw portrayed.
It occurs to me that the multiverse mind-set may also reflect the cognitive effects of dating apps that, defeatist by design, project a mirage of endless romantic possibilities across infinite timelines. One guy I went out with spoke with a hint of longing about the relationship between his grandparents, who barely spoke to each other before getting married as teenagers in Sicily, thrown together by slim-pickings village life, adolescent hormones and the oppressive myth of female honor. What a system, what a gamble, and then both people were trapped for life. But at least you were spared the anxiety of choice. At least there was that.
The structure of my life needed toppling, it turned out, and I am grateful, and I have been doing my best to be J.'s friend. On a recent afternoon, my daughter and I sat on a blanket in a park with him. A group of teenagers were playing volleyball nearby, using a horizontally growing tree as their net. My daughter had a hankering to swing on that tree, and so we were keeping an eye on the teenagers, waiting for them to disband, urging her to be patient. A few days later, I received a characteristically whimsical text: 'In some other timeline we're still waiting by that tree for the teenagers to finish playing volleyball.'
'Some other timeline.' The phrase captures not only J.'s inclination to keep all possibilities perpetually and wistfully open but my own dogged attachment to a foreclosed dimension, my pouring into that hypothetical so much vitality, care and hope — laborious hope — that might have been, and might still be, reserved for what is possible and happening now, only once, in my fleeting middle age. To forego life for a fantasy: What could be more fatalistic than that?
'Maybe the problem is that you're a romantic,' says my former lover-slash-friend-slash-male-sensitivity-reader. 'And maybe so are the other fatalists.' Sure, maybe. We know — have long known — that romanticism and fatalism are dialectical lovers. When love fails, the very quality that elevated it above the common thrum of experience makes it impossible to imagine anything of the kind ever occurring again. The miraculous singularity of being in love is thus particularly fertile soil for a generalizing pessimism: 'I'm attracted to men because I love making bad choices,' goes one quintessentially heterofatalist tweet. This turn, from one man to the imaginary monolith of 'men,' both deprives the wounding man of specificity and shows him a certain loyalty; by casting him to play an entire gender, we make sure that we will meet him again. There is something here of the spirited young nun's frenzied renunciation, slamming the door on romance with an intensely romantic slam, then wedding herself to a male abstraction.
One thing heterofatalism reflects is a persistent lack of faith that those we desire will be able to recognize us as commensurately human. I wonder how much, fearing what we expect and expecting what we fear, we summon the 'old-fashioned man-woman stuff' that keeps coming around. A woman comes, a man withdraws; this embodiment needn't necessarily become pregnant with larger meaning, but it often does. I end up wondering if it is my own fault somehow when the heterosexual dynamic cannot seem to transcend its own tropes, subvert its own symbolism, play out an entirely unpredictable scene.
Seresin rightly pokes fun at the privileged ignorance of straights who, in moments of yearning to experience a desire that we imagine as more extricable from our own oppression, announce a wish to be queer. No relationship — regardless of gender, orientation, number of people — is immune from power dynamics; unequal distribution is always, so to speak, on the bed. But in queer relationships the roles are at least less determined, with perhaps more freedom and flexibility in who assumes which, and how. In other words, maybe our pessimism about straightness arises in part from a dawning sense of its anachronism. Maybe, like the surge of interest in straight nonmonogamy, it's part of heterosexuality's clumsy process of queering itself into a more fluid future.
To break the impasse of 'complementary twoness' that can grip any pair of people, Jessica Benjamin imagines how we might collaborate, over time (and the time is crucial), to create an 'intersubjective third,' a space in which your needs and mine, your desires and mine, recognize and accept each other without competing for dominance. To create such a space, Benjamin says, requires a mutual surrender that is distinct from submission. I find this distinction difficult to grasp, which is perhaps to say that I experience desire in terms of a struggle that someone must lose. I am ready to cop to some unconscious masochism here. A good man is hard to want, after all, and my sexuality owes me neither protection nor affirmation; it is out for itself, out for a skirmish, a strain, a smell.
'The old way of mating is dead,' said my friend at our colloquy of female complaint over dinner, 'and the new one has yet to be born.' What is the new one? Pessimism may help us feel knowing, but really, we don't know. For now, life has us pinned here: 'I like to make you wait.'
Jean Garnett has published essays in The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily and the Yale Review. A winner of the Pushcart Prize, she is at work on a book about relationships.